The visualization below is from a larger project I am working on in Python related to consumer behavior on Twitter. You can follow the full project as it is being finalized here. The visualization highlights the variation in consumer profiles across businesses and how they vary within each business (The bars represent medians, whereas the coloration represents mean. Incongruities between the two represent a skewed distribution of consumer characteristics, which may indicate bots, the presence of super-users, or something else as yet undetermined)

Economic inequality in the United States is growing and people are pissed off. For a while, this anger was channeled at Wall Street—and given the jaw-dropping profits and dubious economic benefits of recent financial "innovation" this seemed like an appropriate target. However, as financial reform advocates lost momentum in Washington, a new target has emerged that can be stymied locally and is not yet politically entrenched—the sharing economy.

The "sharing economy" is most easily understood as a peer-to-peer marketplace that facilitates transactions (generally) through the web. (Image: Claudio Munoz)

Daniel Kahneman has done as much to change the way we think about economics as anyone—and yet, he is no economist, or at least not as we would traditionally think of one. Kahneman is a psychologist; a psychologist, however, with a Nobel Prize in Economics and the acclamation for having:

"Pretty much created the field of behavioral economics and revolutionized large parts of cognitive psychology and social psychology."- Steven Pinker (Harvard Professor who the Guardian calls "one of the world's top intellectuals)

"Although Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky [the cognitive psychologist who collaborated with Kahneman; he died in 1996] were not economists, they made behavioural economics possible."- Richard Thaler (U. Chicago Professor often cited by others as having himself "created" behavioral economics)

To illustrate how our brain works, Daniel Kahneman devised two systems of thinking. System 1 is the unconscious thought process that effortlessly manages the majority of our behavior (generally, without error). System 2 comprises our active cognitions and requires concentrated effort to apply. System 1, unbeknownst to System 2, automatically makes a number of serial errors that Kahneman has masterfully identified.